News

The Tai ar y Cyd project is a collaboration between social landlords and the Welsh Government to develop a standardised pattern book of low-carbon homes aimed at supporting the delivery of high-quality affordable housing. The Design Commission for Wales has been consulted on the pattern book and its supporting design guide.

The Design Commission recognises the benefits of the Tai ar y Cyd pattern book’s technical, construction and supply chain opportunities that can help contribute towards the delivery of sustainable housing in Wales. Using the pattern book should provide more time for designers to focus on the overall design of a scheme, including analysis of the place and understanding its character, and, with the creative use of the pattern book, has the potential to create high quality schemes with a strong sense of place.

We have supported early testing of the pattern book with placemaking workshops to explore how the pattern book can deliver high-quality, sustainable places to live, but further testing and learning from its application to a variety of sites is needed. The pattern book will need to evolve to respond to challenges identified through its application.

Our workshops have highlighted that, while the pattern book can help deliver low carbon homes, its use alone is not going to deliver our wider placemaking objectives. There are urban design and placemaking considerations beyond the design of the houses themselves that have a significant influence on the quality of developments and the creation of great places to live.

The workshops have highlighted how planning and consenting processes can, despite good intentions, actually adversely impact the delivery of good design, placemaking and sustainable development. The ridged application of different standards, such as separation distances, street widths and car parking, can combine to create schemes that are underutilising finite land, unnecessarily adding infrastructure costs, creating indifferent layouts and not realising our collective placemaking expectations. We believe that the planning and consenting processes are essential, but we need affordable housing developers and their design teams to have the confidence to be more creative and the certainty that good design, that might challenge some of the norms, will be considered on its merit.

The 15 pattern book house types will not be suitable for all sites and contexts and there will be a need for social housing developers to be flexible and either adapt the house types or create different ones in response to the project’s brief, the needs of residents, the site and its context. We see those gaps to include three storey house types, more terraced housing, mews houses and other flat typologies. There is also a need for house types that turn corners well to reflect the importance of corner buildings and provide natural surveillance, house types that manage changes in levels to minimise retaining walls and maximise the quality of outdoor spaces, and house types that deal with tighter separation distances by avoiding habitable windows directly facing onto each other. The pattern book will need ongoing development and refinement in response to lessons learnt as it is implemented.

To fully address placemaking, the Design Guide that accompanies the pattern book needs to refer to considerations beyond the façade of the houses to encompass urban design and placemaking best practice, such as how the properties relate to the street, relationship to views, and how the house types can be used to create varied and characterful streets and public spaces.

Overall, we want to see the Tai ar y Cyd users embrace the pattern book and good placemaking through a design process that overcomes site challenges and positively contributes to new and existing places. We encourage all users of the Tai ar y Cyd pattern book to engage with the Design Commission for Wales and use our national Design Review Service to receive constructive feedback on emerging schemes from our independent, multi-disciplinary panel of practising professional experts. Contact us for more details about Design Review and how we can support your scheme at connect@dcfw.org.